1. Field
Embodiments generally relate to encoding of data in documents, and more particularly to systems and methods for navigating to errors in an eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) document using meta data.
2. Related Art
XBRL is a standardized computer language by which businesses may efficiently and accurately communicate business data with each other and with regulating agencies. It is a markup language not too dissimilar from XML (eXtensible Markup Language) and HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). HTML was designed to display general-purpose data in a standardized way, XML was designed to transport and store general-purpose data in a standardized way, and XBRL was designed to transport and store business data in a standardized way.
XBRL is bringing about a dramatic change in the way people think about exchanging business information. Financial disclosures are a prime example of an industry built around a paper based process that is being pushed into the technological age. This transition involves a paradigm shift from the pixel perfect world of building unstructured reports to a digital world where structured data is dominant.
In existing business reporting systems and methods using XBRL, creating an XBRL representation of a business document is a laborious and error-prone task. A user would need to start with an existing business document such as a computer spreadsheet or word processing document, create a separate XBRL representation of the business document, and run a validation tool to see if there are any errors in the XBRL document. If there are errors in the XBRL document, the user would need to understand the technical details of the XBRL syntax in order to understand the error, figure out where the error originated, and correct the error. Because of the complexities, the time and expense associated with creating XBRL documents has traditionally been very high, and the number of people able to prepare XBRL documents has been suppressed.